Is Man more crucial in the world of Philosophy?

Name: Xueying Chen
UNI: xc2578

1. Introduction

Philosophy is essential because it can help us think critically. This project is to answer whether man is more important in the History of Philosophy or not. The meaning of Man in Philosophy is defined as a human being and human nature. From "The Conception of Man in Existential Philosophy", man is unity and a totality.

The dataset that I use to do analysis is holding at kaggle. It contains about 300,000 sentences and 13 schools. The main techniques that I use to explore the data are WordCloud and Term Frequency — Inverse Document Frequency (TF-IDF).

2. Data Overview

From the dataset Overview, we can see there are 360,808 rows and 11 columns, and there aren't missing values. The first question that I asked myself was: How do I know gender is important in Philosophy? I am going to filter out some columns that I think I may not need during my process. I mainly focus on the author, school, original_publication_date, corpus_edition_date, and sentence_lowered because I would like to use Word Clouds to visual the most frequent words in each school.

3. Data Cleaning

4. Analysis

4.1 Connecting Publication Date with Hisotry

From the range of the original Publication data, It was starting from 350 to 1985. It reflects males dominate the culture that we are living in. In the past, a male had more opportunites to get eductions. Therefore, man has more opportunites to write Philosophy and express their thougths and ideas.

4.2 WordCloud

From the above WordClouds, we can easily see "man" or "men" in each school's WordCloud except for Capitalism and German_idealism. A man got mentioned a lot in those works. Other than "man," there are some words that appear a lot as well, such as "good," "think," "ting," and so on. Therefore, Man is essential for Philosophy. Back in our history, man is the control of the world. He could help us think correctly, act like good people, and do the right things.

4.3 TOP 10 words for each school

From the above graphs, man is ranking 5th in Plato, second on Aristotle, 4th on Empiricism, 8th on Rationalism, 9th on Continental, 4th on Stoicism, 1st on Nietzsche, and 3rd on Feminism.

4.4 TF-IDF

From the above TF-IDF statistics and graphs, idf_weight for a word is defined as the importance of that word across the document. The lowest means the most important. The idf_weight of 'man' belongs in the top 10 lowest level, which means "man" is significant in Philosophy. The highest idf_weight is around ten among every school. However, idf_weight of man is 3.9 on Plato, 3.75 on Aristotle, 3.6 on Empiricism, 3.98 on Rationalism, 4.39 on Continential, 3.24 on Stoicism, 3.6 on Nietzsche, and 3.39 on Feminism. We can conclude that "man" appears in almost every school in our dataset.

5. Conclusion

From studying this philosophy dataset, I concluded that "man" is more important in the world of Philosophy. Our history reflects that man was dominating the world in the past. From human nature to understand this question, it can also be that "man" is just a human being; it can help us act and think critically.